Politics

The mixture as before?

Much of French politics is not a matter of left and right

ONE REASON WHY French political leaders are so reluctant to cede more power to Brussels is that, under the constitution of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, they have such a lot of it. In most European countries coalition governments are the norm, so elected parliaments are robustly independent. In France, save for the occasional periods of cohabitation, the president is all-powerful, able to pick and choose prime ministers and members of the government at will and largely unchallenged by any parliamentary opposition. Presidential authority also benefits from France’s relatively weak and often fawning media.

This has several undesirable consequences. One is that opposition in France, rather than making itself heard in parliamentary or public debates, often takes the form of street demonstrations. Mr Chirac’s first government was confronted by rampant protests in 1995, and managed to lose a snap parliamentary election two years later. Mr Sarkozy’s early attempts at reform a decade later also provoked big demonstrations.

French politics in the Fifth Republic is also unusually personalised. Political parties have a tendency to become vehicles for their leaders. Indeed, the centre-right UMP has often changed its name when it has acquired a new leader. This is not true of the Socialists, but the system of primaries to choose the party’s presidential candidate has weakened the grip of its left-bank grandees. In 2007 Ségolène Royal was backed by few of the party’s bigwigs yet won the presidential nomination before losing the election to Mr Sarkozy.

The French system also tends to produce political leaders who are all of a type. Few have any business or international experience or speak any foreign languages. Most are graduates of one of the grandes écoles (Mr Sarkozy was an exception, but with Mr Hollande the country has resumed its habit of choosing énarques as presidents). Most ministers, even on the lower pay set by Mr Hollande, work in grand town houses dotted around central Paris and are ferried about in cars (you seldom see a minister on the metro). All this breeds a detachment from reality that strengthens an innate belief in statism, a mistrust of free markets and a hostility to the world of finance and commerce, all deeply entrenched in the French body politic.

Filthy rich

Indeed, such views are entrenched in the minds of many French voters as well. In this respect France is different from many other affluent countries. One businesswoman says that the rich are now stigmatised in the way Jews were 70 years ago. Perhaps as a legacy from the revolution, the French are also obsessed by inequality—even though France is now a rarity in that inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is actually lower today than it was in the mid-1980s.

Similarly, economics textbooks in schools and universities generally take a more hostile view of free markets and a more favourable one of state intervention than those in other countries. Opinion polls show that the French are less keen on Anglo-American free markets than people in other countries. Asked if capitalism is functioning reasonably well and should be preserved, only 15% of respondents in France say yes, compared with 45% in Britain, 55% in America and 65% in supposedly communist China (see chart 4). This is partly hypocrisy: despite its apparent distaste for American imports, France has more McDonald’s restaurants than any other big country in Europe, and American-style coffee shops have made inroads into the market of traditional French cafés.

This is not a matter of left and right. Mr Hollande once said he did not like the rich, and in the election campaign declared that the chief enemy of France was finance. So far, so expected; but he was echoing not only Mitterrand (who denounced “all the power of money”) but also de Gaulle, who declared that “my only enemy, and that of France, has never ceased to be money,” and Edouard Balladur, a former Gaullist prime minister who once defined civilisation as the struggle against the market. No French political leader would dare to emulate Peter Mandelson, a senior British Labour politician, who said in 1998 that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”.

One possible exception may have been Mr Sarkozy. In 2007 he defeated Ms Royal by running as an outsider, a man with a Hungarian father and who did not graduate from a grande école. He also told voters that France needed to change, to learn from other countries such as Britain and America and to be prepared for what he called la rupture. For a time before and after his election in May 2007 he seemed to be the man who might at last reform France. He faced down strikes to eliminate special pension regimes for some public-sector workers, shook up and partly liberalised the universities and began the long process of pushing up the retirement age.

It was the onset of the financial crisis in 2008 that drove Mr Sarkozy off course, in two ways. The first was economic: slower growth and then recession, followed by rising public borrowing and debt and higher unemployment, would have made reform harder to implement. The second was to undermine many of the arguments he had used for change. It was difficult to preach the case for freer markets when free-market excesses were widely thought to have caused the global financial meltdown. Mr Sarkozy himself was never a natural liberal. One fellow political leader from the European People’s Party, the club of centre-right parties in Europe, recalls that when he and his colleagues discussed such goals as lower taxes, a smaller state, freer markets and deregulation, Mr Sarkozy would often argue against them.

The all-but-total absence of a liberal voice is another striking feature of French politics. Philippe Manière, a commentator, laments that “nobody in France campaigns for liberal ideas now.” A few years ago Alain Madelin, a centrist politician, made a stab at it, and a new liberal think-tank is soon to be launched. But although France’s first dictionary of liberalism has just come out, liberal-minded thinkers and political activists find it hard to get airtime, win seats or spread their ideas.

The future of the right in France is equally unclear. It is impossible to say which of the two candidates for the leadership of the centre-right UMP will win the primary that is now under way. According to most opinion polls the favourite is François Fillon, who served as prime minister throughout Mr Sarkozy’s presidency. But his rival, Jean-François Copé, has been running the party for the past two years, and only members of the UMP can vote.

The first test for whoever wins may not be how best to oppose Mr Hollande’s government but how best to deal with the far right. Ten years ago the world was shocked when the National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen pushed the Socialists’ Lionel Jospin out of the presidential run-off, thereby handing the second round to Mr Chirac. The National Front is now led by Mr Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, who took 18% of the vote in the first round of this year’s presidential election. She did not get into the run-off, but the combined score for her and the far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, both standing on an anti-euro, anti-EU and anti-free trade platform, was a shocking 30%. The National Front also won seats in parliament this year for the first time since the 1990s.

Ms Le Pen’s strategy is clear. She is trying to broaden the National Front’s appeal by toning down its attacks on immigration and diluting its racist and often anti-Semitic message. In their place she has put hostility to Islamification, and also to the EU and the euro, which she blames for aggravating rather than helping to solve France’s economic crisis. In a grumpy country that feels increasingly marginalised in Brussels, this plays well. To vote for or work with the National Front is no longer seen as socially beyond the pale, which is why more women now do so.

Left in charge

For now, however, it is the Socialists who are firmly in power, and the most pressing question for France is whether they are capable of restoring the economy to health. Even neutral observers doubt both Mr Hollande’s belief in reform and his strength of resolve to push it through.

Alain Minc, a well-connected analyst who is sympathetic to the centre-right, concedes that Mr Hollande is clever and well-informed, but notes that the president and his team have no knowledge or experience of any kind of business. Mr Minc finds it telling that the government advocates the policies of John Maynard Keynes (to boost domestic demand) but not Joseph Schumpeter (for the creative destruction that goes with entrepreneurialism). It may not be 1981 all over again, he adds, but the Hollande government is still essentially suspicious of business.

Mr Hollande is having to deal with tensions between his former partner and his current girlfriend, Valérie Trierweiler

That view is shared by Maurice Lévy, the boss of Publicis, a public-relations giant. He agrees that Mr Hollande is intelligent, citing as an example a meeting with him last December at which he conceded not only that steep social charges were putting French business at a competitive disadvantage but also that the Socialists’ hallowed 35-hour week had been a big handicap. Yet he faults the president for not grappling with the crisis and instead running through his campaign “shopping list”: raising the minimum wage, cutting the price of petrol, bringing in the 75% tax rate and so on. Mr Lévy suggests that a leader who wants to reform France needs two things: a real sense of crisis, and balls—and implies that Mr Hollande lacks both.

There are other reasons for doubt. When Mr Sarkozy tried to restart the reforms that Mr Chirac largely abandoned, he had one big advantage: that he had won a mandate by campaigning for change. Zaki Laïdi, a professor at Sciences-Po and a supporter of Mr Hollande’s, insists he is a convinced reformer, though he admits reform is hard in a country without a culture of compromise. But most voters thought the Hollande message was not so much about reform as about ending unnecessary austerity, one reason why there were protests against September’s belt-tightening budget.

Sotto voce, supporters of Mr Hollande voice doubts about his grit and determination for another reason that has echoes of his predecessor: difficulties in his romantic life. Mr Sarkozy was distracted early in his presidency by the very public departure of his then wife, Cécilia, and by his courtship of and marriage to Carla Bruni. Mr Hollande, who is unmarried, is having to deal with tensions between his former partner (and mother of his four children), Ms Royal, and his current girlfriend, Valérie Trierweiler. Ms Trierweiler, a journalist at Paris-Match, lent public support to a political rival of Ms Royal’s who went on to defeat her in the parliamentary election in June (Ms Trierweiler later apologised). Ms Royal had hoped to become speaker of the National Assembly and is still casting about for some political role. If Mr Hollande cannot cope at home, some ask, can he really cope with the problems of his country?